Olympics-China Media Watch: Does Xinhua know gymnast's real age?

NBC coverage of the women's gymnastics team competition made incessant mention of the controversy over the Chinese athletes' ages. Are they really 16, or are they underage? And what does that say about the awful and efficient "machine" that pumps out China's Olympians? NBC announcers made sure that American viewers pondered the matter as the gold medal went to the Chinese team.

It hardly seems fair to look at how the Chinese media deals with the
gymnasts' ages, given the go-team patriotism of many in the U.S. media.
Except that scanning the official press yields an apparent
admission that one of the athletes, He Kexin, is indeed underage. China Digital Timesand The Associated Press
point out that an official Xinhua News Agency report in November
said the gymnast was 13. (They grow up so quickly, don't they?) An
official told AP that Xinhua had simply made a mistake.

Chinese news outlets don't seem to have anything to say about this newest revelation, though Xinhua's November report was still posted online when I checked today.

A few Chinese bloggers, like this one, picked up on it, focusing more than anything on the fact that the American media is convinced there's a scandal.

Kristin Jones, a consultant to CPJ's Asia program, is an independent investigative reporter. In 2011, she was part of a team that won a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for "Seeking Justice for Campus Rapes," a collaboration between NPR and the Center for Public Integrity. Jones was CPJ's senior Asia research associate until 2007. She led writing on the CPJ report "Falling Short," which documented press freedom abuses in China ahead of the 2008 Olympic Games.